The present invention relates to image classification problems, and more specifically, to techniques for classifying echocardiogram videos.
Echocardiography is an important diagnostic aid in cardiology for the morphological and functional assessment of the heart. During an echocardiogram exam, a sonographer images the heart using ultrasound by placing a transducer against the patient's chest. Reflected sound waves reveal the inner structure of the heart walls and the velocities of blood flows. Since these measurements are typically made using 2D slices of the heart, the transducer position is varied during an echo exam to capture different anatomical sections of the heart from different viewpoints.
In current clinical practice, transducer positioning and viewpoint capture requires manual intervention in both imaging and in interpretation. The sonographer manually delineates major anatomical structures like Left Ventricle (LV) and computes numerical quantities like ejection fraction from the images. This data is examined further by a cardiologist who makes the diagnosis based on the interpretation made from the echocardiogram. The knowledge of the probe viewpoint plays a crucial role in the interpretation process as it tells the examiner what exactly is he or she looking at.